The internet is in decline – it needs rewilding
The online world was meant to be an open system but has become dominated by huge corporations. If we are to revive it, that must end
B rowsing through a history of online public messaging last week, I came across a magical photograph from 1989 or 1990. It shows the world’s first web server. It was Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT workstation in Cern, the international physics research lab, where he worked at the time. On the case is a tattered sticky label, on which is scribbled, in red ink, “This machine is a server DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”
Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, had come up with the idea for a “world wide web” as a way of locating and accessing documents that were scattered all over the internet. With a small group of colleagues he envisaged, designed and implemented it in the late 1980s and eventually put the whole thing – protocols, server and browser software, HTML specification, etc. – on one of Cern’s internet servers, and in doing so changed the world.
He was able to do this because the internet, which had been publicly available since January 1983, enabled it. The network had no central ownership or controller; and it did only one thing – transfer data packets from one edge of the network to their destination at another edge. If you were smart enough to build an application that used data packets, then the internet would do it for you, no questions asked.
